Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood

How hard is Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing to read?

Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing scores 41 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 46 out of 100

Atwood's lecture prose is conversational and wickedly plain, but it name-checks an enormous shelf — Gilgamesh, Rilke, Isak Dinesen, Adrienne Rich — and reaches for the odd Latin tag or Victorian curio when it suits her. Elevated but never opaque; the wit does the heavy lifting.

Sentence structure: 44 out of 100

Sentences built for the podium: rhythmic, aphoristic, frequently interrupted by asides in dashes and parentheses. They read aloud beautifully and parse easily — closer to essayistic conversation than to academic construction.

Abstraction: 56 out of 100

The subject is inherently abstract — what a writer is, whether the one who writes is the same person who walks the dog, why art wants money's opposite — but every abstraction gets grounded in fairy tales, myths, and Atwood's memories of 1950s Canada. Ideas lead; anecdotes carry them.

Information density: 50 out of 100

Each chapter braids memoir, a small anthology of quotations, and an argument, with allusions arriving several to a page. The pace stays comfortable because Atwood explains what she quotes, but attentive readers will fill margins with names to look up.

How Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing is regarded

Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing holds a literary regard score of 59 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

About the author

Margaret Atwood